


Bring Me To Life

by hooliganism



Category: Lunar Chronicles - Marissa Meyer
Genre: F/M, TLC shipweeks, i am terrible at writing serious fiction, kind of sad
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-22
Updated: 2015-01-22
Packaged: 2018-03-08 15:51:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3214826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hooliganism/pseuds/hooliganism
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cinder and Kai. One chapter after the end of each book.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bring Me To Life

**Bring Me To Life [Cinder x Kai | Part One | Dreams]**

Bring Me To Life [Cinder x Kai | Part Two | Masquerade]

Bring Me To Life [Cinder x Kai | Part Three | Celestial]

  
  


dreams

 

i.

_dream me, oh dreamer, down to your core_

_open my hands and let them weave onto yours_

 

Kai kept having the strangest dream. In his dream, he was walking along the beach when he came across a mermaid-- or maybe more accurately, the corpse of a mermaid. She- it- was washed up on the beach and must have been there for a few days at least. Its tail had huge chunks ripped out of it in the shape of bites- perhaps she'd been attacked by a shark or some other great oceanic predator. One of the chunks was washed up beside her on the beach and the tail was beginning to rot from the fin-end up. Rot also surrounded the bites in her tail. The entire left side of her body was mangled, skin stripped away to reveal stringy muscle and white bone. Her ribs protruded through the left half of her chest. The left arm was ripped right off slightly above the elbow, and the remains of the arm too had washed up near the unfortunate mermaid. Flesh around her mouth and jaw was missing, exposing teeth and  the remains of a torn-out tongue. The left eye was completely gone, leaving only a gaping black socket in its place. Depending on the dream, the right eye was either staring blankly at him or beginning to be eaten by small sand-worms. The sand surrounding the mermaid was turned into a thick red mud thanks to her blood and the tide.

Right around this time, Kai woke up from his dream, feeling nauseated and repulsed but otherwise not greatly affected by his gruesome dream. But today…

The mermaid was still lying in red mud, still torn apart, ribs still sticking through the chest. But this time, her heart was sticking through her broken ribs and lying exposed to the elements. But the heart was still beating, still pumping the mermaid's lifeblood through ruptured arteries and into the tide. She was still alive. Kai was trapped. He couldn't look away from the putrid sight, but he was still somehow drawn to the mermaid, this poor creature and her beautiful brown eyes....

Eyes. This time she had both of her eyes, uneaten by maggots. Her brown gems stared pleadingly up at him. She spoke to him- or she tried to. Her mouth tried and failed to form words around a stump of a tongue and missing lips and exposed teeth. She only managed a ghastly hissing noise.

He knew what the dreams were about. Who they were about. The mermaid was Linh Cinder, of course. Ever since he had learned that she was a cyborg, about that 36.28% of her that was not human Lunar, he’d been having dreams about her. About her injuries.

When he’d met her at the market, he’d thought that she had an honest face. She didn’t hide behind makeup or titles like any of the other women he was accustomed to. But her face was a lie as well-- extensive damage had been done to her head in that hover accident, and the surgery- the repairs- that had been done to her was nothing less than miraculous.

No, he kept forgetting. She hadn’t been injured in an hover wreck when she was eleven. She’d been burned alive when she was two years old. Her surgeries were nothing less than gut-churning.

So Cinder was a cyborg. Now that Kai had had some time to think about it, he could understand why she never told him. If he had known, he would never have ~~bullied her into attending~~ asked her to the ball. But he couldn’t help feeling that everything else with her had been real. ( _It wasn’t,_ a voice in his head insisted _, she’s a Lunar too and she tricked you just like the rest of them._ Kai tried his best to ignore the voice.)

With Cinder, Kai had never felt the kind of glamour that Queen Levana used to keep control of her subjects. He’d never had thoughts of crazed adoration for Cinder, never seen her as a goddess. He thought she was average as far as looks went, but oddly enough her simplicity had attracted him to her more than Levana’s forced beauty ever had. Anything he thought he felt for Cinder seemed organic and natural--  it had never felt like she was ever forcing those thoughts and feelings onto him.

 _Which could,_ the little voice pointed out helpfully, _just mean that Cinder is more subtle than Levana._

Kai really didn’t want to believe that Cinder had tricked him. His gut told him that she was sincere, that she’d never lied to him (other than the cyborg thing), that when she’d kissed him at the ball, it was because she wanted to. Because she was a normal girl and he was a (mostly) normal boy and they kind of liked each other.

His gut had been wrong before. Just because he desperately wanted what he’d had with Cinder to be real… he couldn’t be sure.

It wasn’t always the mermaid dream. Sometimes, Kai dreamed of the day they met at the market, or when she kissed him. Those were what he liked best- dreams that let him pretend, just for a minute, that they were just two normal people.

If Kai were a normal person, a commoner, he would have been free to pursue… whatever it was that he and Cinder had. If he were normal, he wouldn’t be negotiating peace with Levana through a marriage contract.

Kai frowned and gritted his teeth. The fact was, he wasn’t normal, and he couldn’t afford little teenage infatuations right now. Not when the fate of his country, of his planet was resting in his young shoulders. Yes, it was true that unless Cinder had been manipulating him, he’d possessed actual feelings for her. It was also true that Levana would only be satisfied with a marriage alliance and she would not rest until she was the Empress of the Eastern Commonwealth. Kai was Emperor now, and couldn’t allow teenage feelings to cloud his judgement.

He supposed that even if he never saw Linh Cinder again, whether she was captured and executed or somehow managed to evade the law, he would always have his dreams of her.

 

That would have to be enough.

 

 


End file.
